{"id":297282,"date":"2010-02-09T10:00:20","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T15:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.wordpress.com\/?p=97665"},"modified":"2010-02-09T10:00:20","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T15:00:20","slug":"with-sms-twilio-continues-to-shake-up-communications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/297282","title":{"rendered":"With SMS, Twilio Continues to Shake Up Communications"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"About 25 months ago, when I first met Jeff Lawson, formerly of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the founder and CEO of Twilio<\/a>, I was skeptical of his chances. After all, he wanted to marry the world of voice to the world of web applications. This oft-discussed marriage of web and voice has been attempted many times and has often met with failure<\/a>. So for the longest time I resisted writing about it.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to today and my skepticism about Jeff’s business is decreasing, for multiple reasons. For starters, the company, which has raised $4.3\u00a03.7 million<\/a> in total funding from the likes of Union Square Ventures, The Founders Fund and well-known angel investors, has been very smart about leveraging AWS<\/a> to build a massively scalable telephony platform cheaply. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, when describing his fascination with Twilio recently, remarked<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cTwilio excites me with their programmable voice platform and that is a company where you see the power of the cloud, of a startup becoming a platform to challenge any incumbent. The cloud is helping make an even playing field.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More importantly,\u00a0it’s gained traction with developers, its target market.\u00a0In a marketplace where giants like BT<\/a> (via Ribbit) and Telefonica are stalking similar opportunities<\/a>, Twilio’s early traction is testament to the company’s laser-sharp focus on developers and their needs. It has taken what had been a complex task and made it simple. Using Twilio, developers can add new phone numbers in real time, allowing them to re-sell them to their customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"twiliosmsworks.jpg\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The dead-simple service gives even voice newbies an ability to add voice-to-web apps. It’s garnered the support of nearly 6,000 developers, who have built 1,000 applications that utilize Twilio’s voice API in their web applications. From Heineken to Sony to Intuit — all are users of Twilio’s service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"twiliopricing.jpg\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Today Twilio is launching Twilio SMS, which allows app developers to add SMS-based functionality to their web apps for about 3 cents a message. By working with SMS wholesalers and developing such a simple SMS integration platform, the pay-as-you-go service means that any app can have notifications or can be made to do specific tasks via SMS. In addition, the company has cut the per-month, per-phone number price to $1 a month from $5. Toll-free numbers cost $2 a month. Lawson says that even at $1 a month he makes money, so he is happy to discount.<\/p>\n

With my initial skepticism subsiding, it’s clear that I’m going to be keeping an eye on this little company, looking forward to their next disruption.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About 25 months ago, when I first met Jeff Lawson, formerly of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the founder and CEO of Twilio, I was skeptical of his chances. After all, he wanted to marry the world of voice to the world of web applications. This oft-discussed marriage of web and voice has been attempted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":674,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/674"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}